Social Security Facing A Challenging Budget Situation

During FYs 2011
-
2013, our budget situation was
severe
.
For 3
years in a row, we received
nearly a billion dollars less than the
President’s budget request. Over those years, we had to
make some deep reductions in our services to the public and in our stewardship efforts, while
still meeting our mission and serving the public as best as possible
. We took the following
actions.

We significantly limited hiring, with only minimal hiring in critical front
-
line areas;

Reduced the hours that our field offices are open to the public to allow us to complete
late
-
day interviews without using overtime and to complete retirement and disability
claims and other post
-
entitlement work;

As a result of
significantly limited hiring, wait times in field offices increased,
callers to
our 800
Number
had to wait longer to speak with a representative, and hearings processing time
increased. In addition, we were not able to ramp up
our cost-effective program integrity efforts
as planned.

We are pleased that we
received additional resources
in FY
2014, and we thank you for your
support. As a result, we are able to
begin
the recovery efforts from
3
years of underfunding.
However, it
will take time to reverse the
impact on
service
s from the years of underfunding.
It is
critical that we receive the level of funding requested for our agency in the President’s FY 2015
Budget.

7 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I feel one area that needs be closely looked at is the overtime. There is a lot of horseplay, wasted time, and doing work that could have been done during the week if one wanted to. Overtime is a big expense at time and a half. Many employees almost double their salaries with this.

I have never seen horseplay or wasted time during overtime in any of the numerous field offices I have worked in, so the previous comment must be related to a regional or headquarters component who shouldn't have overtime anyways.

The agency wouldn't be so dependent on OT if it were allowed to actually meet staffing demands with regular hiring instead of using OT to try and make up for the inabiltiy to hire and train enough bodies to do the work

I noticed no mention by Ms. Laconfora of SSA's elimination of large monetary bonuses particularly those payments to upper management/SES functionaries, the elimination of the expenses of conferences, or PR fluff such as the most popular vampire names, and payments to third-rate actors for worthless ad campaigns.